Director, Application Security

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Director, Application Security based in the United States.

This senior security leadership role will shape the strategy, execution, and maturity of application security and security architecture across a large technology organization.
You will lead multiple teams and managers while partnering closely with product, platform engineering, legal, privacy, and compliance stakeholders.
The role combines strategic leadership with strong technical credibility, particularly across application security, cloud security, architecture, and secure software development.
You will build security capabilities directly into developer workflows, CI/CD pipelines, platforms, and product design processes.
The position offers significant ownership over technical roadmaps, organizational development, budgets, tooling, and security investment priorities.
You will help establish a developer-first security culture where secure engineering practices accelerate delivery rather than create unnecessary friction.
This is a fully remote U.S. leadership opportunity for an experienced security builder who can operate effectively across engineering, business, and executive environments.

Accountabilities:
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Lead and develop a multi-manager security organization spanning Application Security and Security Architecture, establishing clear priorities, strong team culture, and high-performance expectations.

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Define and execute a 2–3-year strategic roadmap aligned with product and platform engineering priorities and the organization’s evolving security needs.

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Own workforce planning, organizational design, talent acquisition, succession planning, and development of future security leaders.

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Build and retain highly technical security teams, with an emphasis on engineers who can develop, automate, and integrate security capabilities into engineering environments.

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Manage operational budgets, security tooling portfolios, and vendor relationships, prioritizing automation, measurable return on investment, consolidation, and reduction of unnecessary tool complexity.

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Represent application security and architecture at executive and leadership levels, translating technical security risks into clear business and financial implications.

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Lead an Application Security program that partners with engineering teams and embeds security capabilities into CI/CD pipelines, development frameworks, and developer tooling.

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Develop security enablement programs, secure coding training, and internal tools that make secure development practices easier for engineers to adopt.

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Ensure broad application security coverage across secure design reviews, SAST/DAST, dependency management, API security, and related application protection capabilities.

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Establish product security practices that incorporate security considerations during product and feature design rather than relying primarily on end-of-development audits.

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Build and maintain a risk-based vulnerability management program with defined service-level agreements, prioritization processes, and executive reporting.

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Partner with Security Architecture and Platform Engineering to establish enterprise security patterns, reference architectures, and practical guardrails for cloud-native infrastructure.

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Advance Zero Trust and identity-driven access principles across the environment, integrating security into infrastructure-as-code and platform capabilities.

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Provide proactive, practical security guidance during product and platform design reviews to help engineering teams move quickly while managing risk.

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Monitor emerging threats and technology developments, including AI/ML-related attack surfaces and cloud configuration risks, and evolve security architecture accordingly.

Requirements:

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12+ years of progressive experience in information security, includi